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Professor Richard Larsen

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The Laudato Si' Award

This award recognizes faculty whose work integrates principles of integral ecology through curriculum, scholarship, or programming, advancing environmental justice, sustainability, and care for our common home with measurable impact. The 2026 recipient of this year’s award is Professor Rich Larsen.

Rich Larsen has served the 第一吃瓜网's Academic Theatre Program and University Players since 1993, and in that time he has built a sustained and creative model of ecological stewardship. Long before sustainability became an institutional priority, Professor Larsen was rethinking how theatre gets made, replacing solvent-based paints with water-based scenic coatings, designing sets from reusable stock materials, repurposing Styrofoam shipping forms as scenic decoration, and binding unused paint with sawdust to keep it out of the water table. His scenic design for a recent musical production used an estimated just $400 in new materials, the rest assembled entirely from stock, donated, and reclaimed items.

The University Players' most recent production was set in a world where the bee population has been lost to climate change, weaving care for creation into the stories told on stage.

Professor Larsen has demonstrated for more than three decades that the theatre can model the kind of creative stewardship our common home demands.  

 

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